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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

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Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#231

Post by narag »

mike_hearn wrote: post #175
narag wrote: post #66

I don't think Microsoft failed to see that most VB programmers wanted to keep VB as it was. Microsoft killed VB with a clear purpose: controlling more tightly as much as Windows development as possible, copying the Java model with .NET. If that seems like too conspiranoic theory, let's say that their new Devs head, Anders Hejlsberg, wanted a more uniform development experience around .NET and its star, C#. I'd bet fo…

It wasn't deliberately killed. The problem was that VB6 had weird semantics and behavior by the standards of other languages, but .NET was designed primarily around Java's semantics. Rather than pollute their nice next-gen platform (that they wanted to standardize through ECMA even!) with lots of VB6 compatibility goop, Microsoft chose to change VB with a new version that was closer to a normal .NET language. For exa…

OK, you bet for the latter. But:

They also didn't seem to care much about being fully compatible...

That sounds deliberate.

Edit, to clarify: I doubt they didn't anticipate the frustration and the hit on the mindshare. From Ballmer's show, shouting "developers", to spit in the face...

I didn't use VB6, but I do remember the complaints.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#233

Post by jeffdn »

svachalek wrote: post #213
tarasglek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I got started programming in VB3! Thank you for your involvement in forming my expectations of programming. I feel like my path was so much better because I started from laying out a UI and then learning code as a way to make it do stuff instead of the "lets learn complicated goop with no clear purpose first". To this day I'm amazed by how ok devs are with not being able to get instant satisfaction from achievin…

Today's equivalent would be an IDE that you hit "new project" and type a few lines and draw a few boxes and you've got something up and running in the cloud. There's nothing like it as far as I know; there's an entire generation or more who have never seen programming work like that, and don't even envision it, it seems. Bold ambitions these days usually amount to a clone of a popular thing, with some kind of tweak t…

ReTool is sorta this — I imagine that’s why they published this article!

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#234

Post by bazoom42 »

narag wrote: post #66

I don't think Microsoft failed to see that most VB programmers wanted to keep VB as it was. Microsoft killed VB with a clear purpose: controlling more tightly as much as Windows development as possible, copying the Java model with .NET. If that seems like too conspiranoic theory, let's say that their new Devs head, Anders Hejlsberg, wanted a more uniform development experience around .NET and its star, C#. I'd bet fo…

I dont see how .net was more tightly controlled than VB? VB was a closed source proprietary language tightly integrated with the IDE. They had absolute control.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#235

Post by analognoise »

svachalek wrote: post #213
tarasglek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I got started programming in VB3! Thank you for your involvement in forming my expectations of programming. I feel like my path was so much better because I started from laying out a UI and then learning code as a way to make it do stuff instead of the "lets learn complicated goop with no clear purpose first". To this day I'm amazed by how ok devs are with not being able to get instant satisfaction from achievin…

Today's equivalent would be an IDE that you hit "new project" and type a few lines and draw a few boxes and you've got something up and running in the cloud. There's nothing like it as far as I know; there's an entire generation or more who have never seen programming work like that, and don't even envision it, it seems. Bold ambitions these days usually amount to a clone of a popular thing, with some kind of tweak t…

FreePascal/Lazarus is like that, it's actively maintained and totally free.

They're even adding iOS, Android and web targets. Give it a try!

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#236

Post by bazoom42 »

pif wrote: post #84
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #13

You know why Visual Basic was the best programming language ever made? Because it wasn't a programming language. Nerds just can't wrap their heads around this idea: no normal person wants to be a programmer. But they do want to make little custom things to help them get stuff done in life. Just like nobody wants to be a plumber, but they do want to be able to fix their faucet.

Visual Basic shares a fundamental truth with Internet Explorer: popular does not imply good.

VB was great though. Maybe the syntax was a bit clunky, but the overall developer experience was far ahead of other languages. Integrated debugger, edit-and-continue, code completion etc.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#237

Post by fatneckbeard »

think people are missing, VBA is all over the place right now. its not going away. because that's the only language that comes pre-installed on a Windows machine in the average Office.

Any other programming language, from powershell to python, is almost certainly locked off and blocked off by corporate security policy and 10 layers of bureaucracy and organizational organizational-ness.

This is how the world actually works. Because the half-broken obsolete proprietary vendor systems that run the world's major corporations need to be glued together to have any semblance of efficiency, and that glue a lot of times is VBA.

It's basically the continuation of the PC revolution, the PC within the PC if you will. Pushing out and decentralizing the access to computing to the desktop of every employee.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#238

Post by fatneckbeard »

dvdhsu wrote: post #2

It was surprising to us (here at Retool) that visual programming has never taken off, despite countless attempts over the past few decades. (That's why we started Retool, after all.) But Visual Basic is probably the product that came closest, and that's why we wrote this homage to it. It, along with Filemaker, Hypercard, are products that we loved. And we always wished that they had flourished, since then we wouldn't…

VBA, a visual language, runs the entire planet, it's just that nobody knows it or talks about it.

Re: Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic

#240

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

grumpyprole wrote: post #43
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #35

VB was the one thing that most closely approached the promise of object orientation: "bolt-together," "off-the-shelf" components that you could build software with. In VB you could slap together a CRUD app in days, with VBXs (later renamed OCXs). I worked for a company where a bunch of programmers turned up their nose at VB and insisted on using C++, and then they got canned when the VB prototype functioned perfectly…

When I first played with VB in the early nineties, it was also about the time Microsoft Foundation Classes was released. I compared the two approaches for building UIs and it pretty much soured my opinion of C++ for life.

Oh man, while we got a lot done with MFC, I scorned the macro mess that VC++ generated. To this day I detest C/C++ macros and never use them in my own code.

But years later, when I had to switch to the Mac and Project Builder, I couldn't believe how half-assed its integration with Interface Builder was. You couldn't even drag from a control in your UI layout to your view's source code to generate a code stub. You had to manually type stuff like IBOUTLET. And there was no bi-directional updating either, of course. It has gotten a lot better since. Meanwhile, whereas I used to love the Visual Studio IDE itself, I find the same ridiculous bugs in it that I reported 20 years ago...

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